Aryeom, ZeMarmot’s awesome painter artist is actually animator and film director from training. After some time, and traveling the world together for a few years, we decided that maybe an animation film would be a very good fit for ZeMarmot.

Today a small self-promotional message. As you may (or not) know, the Marmot comic is drawn on computer, with the GIMP software, a very fine software for image processing, painting and such. Well I also happen to be a developer on this piece of technical arts!
And I propose today to crowdfund a nice feature I discovered some month ago on another software, when we were at the Libre Graphics Meeting: symmetry painting.

As you know by now, the artist Aryeom is helping me to make this project into a real nice comic with better graphics style and even more: regularity and consistency. We uploaded earlier some illustrations to introduce the main character, Ze Marmot, lazy bastard marmot, because I really wanted to get something out soon.

But now the bulk of the comic has to start. And we are working on finalizing the script, the style of the art, but also: how do we want the story to flow?
Do I want more an illustrative flow, with bigger images, less narrative details, thus likely shorter comic? Or do I want a more typical comic, with more cases, and much more narrative details? You’ll have the response to this question next week! 🙂

As you can see, working with Aryeom has proved quite enlightning and interesting, because this is the sort of question I never wondered about comics before. Obviously it is different when you work with someone who knows better than you!

While waiting for next week comic page, here are some nice shots to show the work in progress.

Researching the best style for our main character.

The photograph on the right shows a research of character design, one of many, with various ideas: rounder or sharper drawing, big nose or not, long or short legs, different fur color for the snout or not, etc. So many choices! 🙂

2 examples of a page flow.

The photo on the left demonstrates 2 possible flowing styles. The left version is more illustrative, bigger cases, more cuts and less intermediary details; while the right tells more useless but funny details (Marmot preparing itself, the burrow exit, patting dust off himself, etc.). Let me tell you: it is hard to choose what I want, because there is no wrong or right choice. And both styles have their good point.